Eric Ries Quotes
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Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.
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Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
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Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.
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If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
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A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
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I actually believed if you work hard enough it was inevitable you'd succeed. Then I lived the 'Social Network' movie, but only the first half. The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.
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In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.
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The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
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You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.
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Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y,' so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
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The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
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Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it.
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Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.
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A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
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Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
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We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
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HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.
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I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.
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Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
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It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.
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Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
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The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
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As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
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The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.